Friday, July 23, 2010

It appears highly unlikely that any “detective work” performed by the CDC and Florida health officials will unearth any evidence of dengue fever being imported into Florida, but the evidence certainly exists. Prior to the recent Key West findings and still today, the CDC has consistently reported that there have been no outbreaks of dengue fever in Florida since 1934, and none in the continental U.S. since 1946. Remarkably, this report is incorrect.

Unknown to most Americans is that dengue fever has been the intense focus of U.S. army and CIA biological warfare researchers for over fifty years. As early as the 1950s, the army’s Fort Detrick in partnership with the CIA launched a multi-million dollar research program under which dengue fever and several addition exotic diseases were studied for use in offensive biological warfare attacks. Indeed, as several CIA documents, as well as the findings of a 1975 Congressional committee reveal that 3 sites in Florida, Key West, Panama City, and Avon Park, as well as 2 other locations in central Florida, were used for experiments with mosquito borne dengue fever and other biological substances.

The experiments in Avon Park, about 170 miles from Miami, were covertly conducted in a low-income African American neighborhood that contained several newly constructed public housing projects. CIA documents related to Project MK/NAOMI clearly indicate that the mosquitoes used in Avon Park were the Aedes aegypti type. Interestingly, at the same time experiments were conducted in Florida there were at least two cases of dengue fever reported among civilian researchers at Fort Detrick in Maryland. Avon Park residents still living in the area say that the experiments resulted in “at least 6 or 7 deaths". One elderly resident told this journalist, “Nobody knew about what had gone on here for years, maybe over 20 years, but in looking back it explained why a bunch of healthy people got sick quick and died at the time of those experiments.”

A 1978 Pentagon publication, entitled Biological Warfare: Secret Testing & Volunteers, reveals that the Army’s Chemical Corps and Special Operations and Projects Divisions at Fort Detrick conducted “tests” similar to the Avon Park experiments in Key West, but the bulk of the documentation concerning this highly classified and covert work is still held by the Pentagon as “secret.” One former Fort Detrick researcher says that the army “performed a number of experiments in the area of the Keys” but that “not all concerned dengue virus.”

In the spring and summer of 1981, Cuba experienced a severe hemorrhagic dengue fever epidemic. Between May and October 1981, the island nation had 158 dengue-related deaths with about 75,000 reported infection cases. Prior to this outbreak, Cuba had reported only a very small number of cases in 1944 and 1977. At the same time as the 1981 outbreak, covert biological warfare attacks on Cuba’s residents and crops were believed to have been conducted against the island by CIA contractors and military airplane flyovers. Particularly harmful to the nation was a severe outbreak of swine flu that Fidel Castro attributed to the CIA.

In 1985 and 1986, authorities in Nicaragua accused the CIA of creating a massive outbreak of dengue fever that infected thousands in that country. CIA officials denied any involvement, but army researchers admitted that intensive work with arthropod vectors for offensive biowarfare objectives had been conducted at Fort Detrick in the early 1980s, having first started in the early 1950s. Fort Detrick researchers reported that huge colonies of mosquitoes infected with not only dengue virus but also yellow fever were maintained at the Frederick, Maryland installation, as well as hordes of flies carrying cholera and anthrax, and thousands of ticks filled with Colorado fever and relapsing fever.

A review of declassified Army Chemical Corps documents reveal that the army may have also been engaged in dengue fever research as early as the late 1940s. Several redacted Camp Detrick and Edgewood Arsenal reports indicate that experiments were conducted on state and federal prisoners who were unwittingly exposed to dengue fever, as well as other viruses, some possibly lethal. Freedom of Information requests filed months ago for details on these early experiments remain unanswered.